By Kathleen Murphy
Special to MSN Movies

You'd think a creature that's evolved out of its animal nature — "red in tooth and claw" — would have little nostalgia for going wild again. But we humans are always dreaming of lighting out into woods or mountains or oceans to rediscover our primal selves, by connecting with simpler, more elemental truths.

Our novels and movies are full of stories about noble savages and godlike beasts who open our over-civilized eyes to wisdom lost as our brains got bigger and stone tools turned into Uzis and Macs and SUVs.

In our myths, heroes traditionally trek off into the wilderness to face their worst fears and claim their truest selves, while native vision quests send boys out into untamed places to bond with totem animals and earn manhood.

The dream of rediscovering paradise fueled our original flight from Europe's Old World, crowded and corrupted by too much history and too little nature. But too often we acted on the dark side of that dream, seeing wilderness as the devil's playground and demonizing native Americans as savages, half-animal projections of our most primitive urges. In this scenario, going wild meant falling back down the evolutionary ladder, not finding your better self.

Sean Penn's new movie "Into the Wild," adapted from Jon Krakauer's best-selling book, follows a young dreamer into the Alaskan hinterlands, where this child of privilege hopes to find a more compelling truth than his culture has ever offered. Here are 10 cinematic sagas about boys gone wild by accident or on purpose, journeys into enlightenment or the heart of darkness.

1. 'Never Cry Wolf'

Call of the Wild
Nerdy, bespectacled naturalist Farley Mowat (Charles Martin Smith) heads into the Canadian Arctic, charged with proving that wolves are decimating the caribou and should be exterminated — but the real impetus for his trek has roots in "an old, naïve childhood fantasy ... to go off into the wilderness and test myself against dangerous things lurking there ... to find some basic animal hidden in myself ... to discover a new man with strength and courage I'd never known before."

Gods and Guides
Guided by an enigmatic Inuit elder, Mowat bonds with an un-Disneyized family of beautiful white wolves, wild beasts that live more wisely than those who would kill them off.

Transformation
Our once-rational scientist sleeps naked in the tundra, then rises up in a river of running caribou. In magical morning light, he runs with the herd, more wolf than man. Then, transfixed, he witnesses a mysterious moment of rapport between predator and prey, as though they shared an ancient understanding of symbiosis.

2. 'Cast Away'

Call of the Wild
The plane carrying a FedEx staffer (Tom Hanks) crashes during a storm, stranding him for years on an uninhabited island.

Gods and Guides
The wound-up hustler for whom time is always of the essence, who's constantly on call to control accident and chance, finds himself grounded, with all the time in the world and no control whatsoever over his life — or death. This unlikely survivalist slows his can-do energy and ingenuity down to a crawl, painstakingly figuring out how to create shelter, food, fire. But his most primal needs are fellowship and a reason to live, so he dreams up guardian deities: his fiancé's photo, ironically contained in a pocket watch; and a bloody-faced volleyball he calls Wilson.

Transformation
From a thoroughly modern man, racing to stay ahead of the game, Hanks metamorphoses into a gaunted caveman, for whom stillness and patience mean survival. As the years pass, despite his despair, this Robinson Crusoe sheds everything but the truest, most vital signs of humanity.

3. 'The Bear'

Call of the Wild
In this visually breathtaking, nearly wordless outdoor adventure, it's easier to identify with wild animals than human hunters. The orphaned bear cub and the majestic male that becomes its protector are wonderfully anthropomorphized, but we see these creatures as part of a spectacular natural design, figures at home in vast, untamed landscapes.

Gods and Guides
Gun-shot, the grizzly heads for a puddle to soak his wound in mud. The lost cub creeps up to lick the bloody hole clean — and finds himself a father. In every particular, the little bear emulates the giant: observing how the big male shakes huge trees to catch a female's attention, the cub grapples hilariously with a shrub.

Transformation
The hunter (Tchéky Karyo) who originally wounded the giant grizzly, harassed it with a pack of slavering dogs and now believes he's "boxed" his prey, suddenly finds himself face to face with the towering beast. Leaning forward, the bear bellows again and again, beating the cowering man down through deafening sound and fury. "Don't kill me, don't kill me," the man pleads — and, mysteriously, the bear doesn't. It's a soul-altering moment, a human killer pardoned by one of nature's noblest beasts.

4. 'Grizzly Man'

Call of the Wild
Troubled, drug-addicted Timothy Treadwell follows the "siren song of a simpler world" to Alaskan grizzly territory, where this lost soul reforms himself so he can protect and be worthy of the bears he loves.

Gods and Guides
For 13 summers, Treadwell lived up close and personal with magnificent grizzlies, videotaping himself essentially worshipping his totem beasts. Yakking away at the camera like a "touched" child with a Prince Valiant haircut, he documents how he's bonded with Mr. Chocolate, Grinch and Aunt Melissa as "children of the universe."

Transformation
Was Treadwell, who dreamed of "mutating" into a grizzly, a holy fool hungry for some kind of religious experience? Or did he "disrespect" the bears by violating an elemental boundary between beast and man, as a native Alaskan claims? However you read his quest, Treadwell never accepted the "overwhelming indifference of nature." Aching to be mythic, he was ultimately only food for his gods.

5. 'Passion in the Desert'

Call of the Wild
After a bout of mutual butchery between 18th century French soldiers and Bedouins, ornately uniformed officer Augustin Robert (Ben Daniels) nearly dies in the desert, even though "it's impossible to get lost in Egypt — there's the Nile and there's the sea!" Fleeing Bedouins, Augustin takes refuge in a haunted landscape of monumental cliffs, scored by endless staircases and a half-ruined, columned temple built into raw rock.

Gods and Guides
Terrified by deep coughs and growls in the cave where he's hiding, Augustin peers into the darkness until two great glowing eyes appear. It's a magnificently marked leopard, her fierce blue eyes matching those of the French soldier, with whom she instantly bonds. Gradually, the big cat seduces him into ever-more feral behavior.

Transformation
So deep into animal life has Augustin fallen that he goes mad with jealousy when his "mate" takes up with another leopard. Naked, he spots and colors his flesh to resemble his rival. Caught between species, this "ghost" wanders the crumbling, moonlit ruins — until he reasserts superior humanity by getting back into uniform, belting on his sword and marching about as though it mattered. Adapted from Honoré de Balzac's novella, "Passion" measures the abyss between human faithlessness and the virtue of beasts.

Next: 'Lord of the Flies,' 'The Edge' and more